So what does EHP really mean?

I crafted a decent shoulder that I thought was a replacement to the one I have on. After putting it on, I felt a bit squishy so I did a test with Azmo. With the new setup, I died near the end of Azmo's health (standing still and just hitting) . With the old setup, I had no problem killing with plenty of health left. Only thing I m losing from the new setup is a bit of resist. The new shoulder was +17k in ehp gain so how could this be?

OLDDPS: 291.7kArmor: 5145Resistance: 600HP: 57kEHP: 623k

NEWDPS: 292.4kArmor: 5149Resistance: 584HP: 59.6kEHP: 640k

Difference from old to newDPS: +0.7kArmor: +4Res: -16HP: +2.6kEHP: +17k

How many times did your run the test? You'd probably be best to run it more than once with each scenario to see what's going on.

Beyond that, it's not just EHP, but it's mitigation. Your HP went up, but your mitigation went down. Presumably, your HP:EHP mitigation ratio (as calculated via d3up.com) has probably gone down. This would also impact your effective sustain as each HP is actually less effective than with your new setup than your old one..

But with all that said, the changes you are talking about (losing 16 on your resists which is 2.67% of your resist mitigation and gaining 4 armor which is negligible) should not be yielding that much of a change.

Which goes back to the question of how many times you did the test? Was it enough to see a trend?

Resist is big. I'm overdoing it (close to 800 at the moment) and even if I drop only 20 or so points, I can tell the difference. When prioritizing your EHP elements, resist and armor are better than plain HP gain.

Overall you lost resistance but gained HP. I'm basically echoing what Nameless already mentioned, but with your newer setup basically you can soak more burst damage in terms of straight HP, but each point of HP is not as efficient as before. With a higher mitigation ratio, your healign fro LS/LoH/abilities end up being worth more, and even with less EHP, a bigger ratio could end up being more beneficial.

This guide from the Monk subreddit should be able to explain this pretty well.

With the new setup, I died near the end of Azmo's health (standing still and just hitting) .

I think there's a difference in where you stand against Azmodan. For example if you walk straight up to him from the spawn point, you'll tank 3 stacks, but if you walk to his right side (or left side) after the movie spawn, you tank at most 2 stacks, usually 1 stack.

Also, not sure if your old set up had things like Transcendence or Combo Strike. Some subtle skills may have a significant impact in-game. I don't think those stats you listed can cause such a big difference.

As long as you keep your health globe full, your ehp means something. But as soon as you start taking hits then your ehp drops like a rock. So the trick is to keep your health globe full at all times.

It depends on your playstyle. If you are playing with a variant of the old school cookie cutter, then your heals are less bursty and more constant, so you can keep it high... but the lack of burst heals can be scary in that once it begins dropping you may have few options to resuscitate outside of heals, potions and dropped health globes.

If you have a spirit spending build, your heals will tend to be more bursty and you will likely see your HP go up and down over the course of the fight. The second you drop a bell, you will tend to have instant full health.

However, if your health globe is dropping like a rock under normal conditions (like when you aren't standing of 3 stacks of plagued, molten and arcane beams at once), it's an indicator that your EHP is too low and more I would speculate that mitigation would often be a better solution over more HP as a means of fixing it.

One thing that may or may not be contributing to this is that Dprog calcs eHP using Dodge and block which yields a highly unrealistic eHP number.

For example: If I drop tons of armor for dodge I could increase my "eHP" but lose true eHP because Azmo's pools can't be dodged.

Furthermore, all eHP is not equal.

HP only increases your true eHP if taking damage that would kill you.Up until that point, your eHP is entirely a factor of your mitigation.

Mitigation ALSO increase effective healing while HP does not.

If you are using LS or LoH, the loss of mitigation in trade for HP will usually result in lower long-term survive ability.

This is why I have traditionally gone with mitigation heavy builds and relatively low life totals.I have started to move away from this because I find my monks life total fluxuates between 100% and 0-10% quite frequently and thus HP is = to mitigation.

Sorry, work got me off the track.Anyway, thanks for all the comments and possible reasons.I checked the dmg mitigation and the difference is -0.16%. Seems like a small difference but is this going to be enough to notice?

Old: 90.85%New: 90.69%Difference: -0.16%

Also, I think I will do the azmo test more as I only did this twice and was standing on different areas throughout.

What would be the best way to increase dmg mitigation in my situation?

I've been paying more attention to tdr and I feel better with the higher number. It was a matter of a couple of tenth difference but it made a noticeable difference. Much less yoyo effect of the hp pool. It's better to avoid dmg in the first place than to take some and heal.

EHP is just a composite number which only means something if you have enough health points after your mitigation kicks in. You can have 99% mitigation but if that 1% is 50k damage, you are still dead if you have 45k HP. I think most of us would recommend having above 50k HP and 90% mitigation to do MP10.

Sustain means you top up your health pool, since lifesteal is the most efficient and scalable form of sustain in D3 and also happens to be the only form monks can rely on, you might as well get as close as 6% to it.

If you can manage to get close to 250K dps with >5% lifesteal, you are already laughing at most of the stuff out there.

At this point, the only thing that can kill your monk (or any of the classes at this point) are champion/elite affixes which place crowd-control upon you and you can't attack anything - read: consecutive freeze/knockbacks/vortexes, followed by ownage from said champion/elites.

BTW, the above is the only reason why barbs would be antsy about WOTB nerf. It means removing CC immunity.